Cecilia, meanwhile, had met some roadies. She d gone with Sheena to see Def Leppard at Oakland Stadium and like a stereotypical little pair of groupies they d found their way backstage by flirting with the bouncer guarding one of the exits. I d always heard those guys expected a blowjob at least to let a girl without a pass through but Cecilia said they hadn t had to put out or anything.
They didn t meet the band but they ended up partying with some of the crew and it turned out that those guys had to take several days breaking down the enormous stage sets and equipment at the stadium and then were at loose ends for a few weeks. I learned about all of this when Cecilia called me up one night to say she was coming out with some friends in the city and would I like to come along. I said sure and they came by to get me.
Sheena was driving her convertible with the top down. I got in the passenger seat and Cecilia sat in the back wedged behind these two huge longhairs I d never met. This is Charlie and Rod, said Cecilia.
Yo, I said.
They were pretty good company, actually. They laughed a lot and liked to tell stories, both from the road and from their own lives.
Charlie had grown up on Long Island so we made the most of that although growing up in the city and out on the island were worlds apart. He was, from the sound of it, about five, six years older than me, meaning he d been a teen in the late 70s. He talked about spending as much time as he could at rock clubs in Manhattan once he got old enough to drive and about how his parent s never figured out he was smoking pot back then.
Why are your eyes so red, Charlie? he said, imitating his mother s voice, I guess.
I don t know, ma.
I guess I got some shampoo in my eyes.
Yeah, said Rod, like every day of high school.
One thing impressed me about these guys.
They were physically very confident and had the blue-collar attitude about just handling physical situations instead of overthinking them. For instance, we got to the bar in the Haight where we were going to hang out and have a few drinks and it was, as usual, nearly impossible to find parking. After we drove around for about ten or fifteen minutes trolling for a space, Charlie and Rod spotted something and told Sheena to pull over.
There was one of those temporary construction fences stabilized by heavy cement feet like bare planters blocking off about three spaces about a block or two off Stanyan. They got out of the car, said one-two-three-heave and moved one end of the fence about a car length. Then they waved Sheena into the space.
They can do that? said Cecilia. I guess so, I said, trying to seem like I would have done it myself if I wasn t a weakling.
Where we saw an immovable fence or a police line and just blindly obeyed its restrictions, they saw a piece of hardware like the kind of stuff they were setting up and tearing down all day long. They could picture the construction crew that set up the fence and the thing had no authority over them, especially at night when they knew the thing was just holding the space for the following day. They even moved it back when we got ready to leave a few hours a later.
Cecilia told me Charlie was definitely hitting on her. He was another big guy with stringy long hair although he wore wireframe glasses, which was a little incongruous, giving him a vague intellectual air. He actually was pretty smart.
He hadn t been to college, but he was a reader and had that habit of sometimes mispronouncing word he d obviously learned from books but hadn t been able to use in his day-to-day life.
In a way I was proud of Cecilia that she was learning to spot when a guy was after her sexually. Usually she was so blinded by the attention and whatever little games she played inside her own head that she wouldn t notice the signals.
I found I had mixed feelings. Sometimes I felt possessive of Cecilia and a lot of the time I didn t. I was starting to let go and it was obvious to me how out of line I was with all the other guys she d ever been with.
She was obviously suited to someone who was more physical than me, more of a doer and less of a thinker. In that sense, maybe Charlie was a good transition. He was, in a strange way, like a kind of pumped up version of me.
He was a stoner, not a jock, and while he was strong and tall he was also good for conversation and not just joshing around and getting wasted.
I almost wanted her to go to him, almost. I also knew that we had always had these open rules and that possessiveness was going to backfire.
It had worked best for me to be entirely open handed. Half the time, nearly all the time in fact, this had led to Cecilia blowing off whatever other guy was intriguing with her and sticking with me. Even if she d had a few side things recently she kept coming back to me.
And then I would wonder how bad I wanted her to keep coming back.
She told me that she had not fooled around with Charlie the night Sheena drove them back to Marin, but that he had made it clear that if he was going to keep spending time on her he expected to get some. He also said that he and his buddies were going to come back through the Bay Area in August with the Monsters of Rock tour, so he could hook her up with tickets and backstage passes then.
Cecilia sounded so excited when she told me this. She sounded like a little girl with a birthday coming up, or maybe First Holy Communion.
I started meeting Giselle after work and before our copyediting class for coffee at Cafe Beautiful People on Bancroft on the south side of the UC campus.
She also started giving me a lift back over the Bay in her little Honda after our classes. We d end up parked right outside my house talking in her car for forty-five minutes or more before I d finally say goodnight and head in.
She seemed fascinated by my stories about my half-in, half-out relationship with Cecilia and about the strangely chaste environment at Climex Books.
She said she didn t have anything nearly as interesting to tell me about but that wasn t really true.
Giselle was in a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend on the east coast, ironically another Princeton guy. He must have been two or three years ahead of me there.
His name did not ring a bell anyway. But she was also seeing a few people out here in SF. One guy and one girl, in fact.
I was impressed by her matter-of-fact declaration of bisexuality. I d met some women before who liked to talk about being bi in a teasing sort of way, suggesting that under the right circumstances maybe, or a woman s body is a beautiful thing, unlike men who are so hairy and gross or maybe remembering some drunken fumbling experimentation in college, but here was someone just making note of the fact that she found men and women equally attractive without making that big a deal of it. If anything, she said, she was drawn a little bit more to women.
The problem was that the girl she d been having a fling with was getting a little too attached. They had met in a poetry class she was taking and it had been her first time with another woman. She was from a fairly traditional Mexican American family and violating the mores of her parents, especially her father, had been exhilarating and liberating, but as soon as she detected that for Giselle it was just a passing thing, she d become almost obsessed and was writing her poetry all the time, shoving notes under her door, leaving long creepy answering machine messages, and generally making Giselle regret the whole thing.
I need to break up with her, she said. It s getting too weird, but I m a little afraid of how she ll react, considering how wiggy she s already gotten.
Does Jack know about any of this?
Jack was her boyfriend.
No, said Giselle. We have a rule.
We know that we re three thousand miles apart and that things happen, so we agreed not to tell each other about anything.
Wow, I said. That s like the opposite of my rule with Cecilia.
We can do anything but we have to tell each other. I told her about my breakup with Simone and the guilt I had felt over breaking promises and my new commitment to never make promises I couldn t be sure I would keep.
Do you think he s seeing other people?
So you think he has no idea you have both an outside boyfriend and girlfriend?
Nope.
I wonder .
I think people can hear it in your voice. But hey, if it s working for you. More power to you.
You re my hero, in fact, juggling three people and two sexes!
You re so silly, she said. Giselle would never say shut up, faggot.
She was remarkably unaffected and unself-conscious about topics like sex, which I found very appealing, but we didn t just talk about sex and relationships. We talked a lot about writing. She told me about her poetry class with some famous antiwar guy in Berkeley I d never heard of and her idea to form a writing group without a leader so people could encourage each other without having to pay someone for the privilege of meeting once a week.
If you get that started, I said. Count me in.
We had talked about the short stories I was writing.
They were all experimental and terrible. They had no quotation marks to tell you when someone was speaking and when it was just the narrator. Or they avoided all exposition entirely, trying to have the dialogue carry the whole story.
Or they were written in pseudo-Borgesian imaginary worlds that smacked too much of the pulp science fiction I had devoured all throughout high school. Or they were about sex but in incredibly coy convoluted metaphors and analogies designed to entirely obscure anything that could ever be traced back to my own personal experience. They were wretched and I pretty much knew it, but I also felt that I had to write a lot of crappy stuff and get it out of my system before I had any hope of writing something good, so I didn t mind too much.
A writing group sounded like a nice safe way to incubate my work and get some feedback from other hopeful beginners.
I will, she said. Probably sometime after my class is over.
I ll let you know.
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